


Life on the Rocks

by piedpiper



Category: The Thrilling Adventure Hour
Genre: Backstory, Canon Compliant, F/M, Trans Male Character
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-12-08
Updated: 2014-12-08
Packaged: 2018-02-28 14:13:35
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 7,001
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2735603
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/piedpiper/pseuds/piedpiper
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>His parents name him Frances Dorothy Rosemarie Doyle — Frances for his grandmother, Dorothy for his dead aunt, Rosemarie because they like the name. He starts telling them to call him Frank as soon as he's old enough to speak, because something about being called Frances makes his skin feel ill-fitting in a way he doesn’t yet quite understand.</p><p>(Or: Frank Doyle is trans. He also did not have a fantastic adolescence. These things don't have a lot to do with each other.)</p>
            </blockquote>





	Life on the Rocks

His parents name him Frances Dorothy Rosemarie Doyle — Frances for his grandmother, Dorothy for his dead aunt, Rosemarie because they like the name. He starts telling them to call him Frank as soon as he’s old enough to speak, because something about being called Frances makes his skin feel ill-fitting in a way he doesn’t yet quite understand. 

His friends and relations don't take him seriously. Of course they don’t. They mostly humor him, because he’s just a kid. His mother says it's a tomboy phase and he'll grow out of it.

They make him wear skirts and long braids in elementary school and he never, ever stops complaining about it. Every afternoon as soon as he gets home he puts on his older brother's clothes and stuffs his hair under a cap and goes wandering around the town in search of mysteries because he wants to be a detective like in all the books. That's how he first meets Peter and Howie, over a couple of pilfered mystery comics in the schoolyard in sixth grade, and he latches onto them and refuses to let go.

The boys don't really want him around at first, this strange not-quite-a-girl with too-large trousers who wants to climb trees and explore old cellars with them. But by the time Frank’s shown them his collection of mystery and detective books and led them around the upstairs rooms of the old mill, they stop seeing him as a hanger-on and start seeing him as a member of the gang. 

Peter’s still the de facto leader, obviously. But in the course of one afternoon, Howie goes from the sidekick to the marginally useful chum. Frank, who _knows_ he’s good at sniffing out mysteries, is fine with this. He’s going to make them the next Hardy Boys, he thinks.

Contoured dresses are back in style when Frank is fourteen but he's taken to wearing overlarge men's shirts instead. His parents are getting more and more worried and he tries to pretend he’s not terrified of what they and other people think. 

He’s just a tomboy, he tells people. That’s all. It’s not like he stares at himself in the mirror at night and tries to picture himself with short hair, not like he flinches whenever someone calls him _Frances,_ not like he’s been binding down his growing breasts with tight undershirts and dreading puberty because of what comes next. It’s not like he focuses obsessively on all the mysteries around Bayport (and there are a _lot_ of them, which he might find odd if he ever stopped to think about it) because he’d rather work on solving any other mystery than what the hell _he_ is.

And then there are the dead bodies.

Frank and Peter and Howie _knew_ that boys have been going missing, sort of. There are news reports about it occasionally, and kids who don’t come back to school. But they haven’t really thought much about it until Peter stumbles across what’s in the woods. 

In the future Frank will wonder _why_ they thought that was an appropriate lead to pursue, _really._ Why they couldn’t all have been just a little more afraid of the _heap of dead bodies_. Sometimes being afraid of things is merited.

Frank probably is some kind of monster, he thinks afterwards. He made the decision so easily. Sure, he and Howie were scared out of their minds, but Frank knew what they had to do and he just did it. Even after they’ve boarded up the old well and fled back to town in Howie’s jalopy, he thinks he can still hear Peter’s screams echoing inside his head.

The next morning, Frank wakes up from his entirely literal nightmares and thinks he has to get the _hell_ out of this town. He doesn't say goodbye to Howie. He cuts his hair short and choppy with a pair of sewing scissors and the boyish face in the mirror would be _almost_ enough to ease the crushing weight on his chest if he didn’t have to keep avoiding his own dark eyes. He takes two of his father's cheapest suits, the bottle of emergency gin from his parents' liquor cabinet, and the fifteen dollars he has left to his name, and leaves. The brief note he leaves behind is signed _Frank_ and that’s all anyone will ever know him as from now on.

He has no idea where he's going apart from _away,_ or what he's going to do other than _everything differently._ He gets four days and two hundred miles away from Bayport before his money runs out, and he discovers then that no train conductor or shop keeper actually wants to hire a scrawny fourteen-year-old who smells like liquor and has no marketable skills other than blustering.

He finishes the bottle of gin sitting on a bench outside the train station and ignores the people in strange, old-fashioned clothes who nobody else can seem to hear and the men with dark eyes and more hair than usual who all the dogs bark at. They're probably just wandering vagrants who nobody wants to talk to, he thinks. That's the only explanation. He _left_ his town and he's gotten away from the things he was running from. He has to have gotten away. The clown _has_ to have been just a fluke. 

He wanders around the unfamiliar town feeling very young and frightened and lost, with absolutely no idea what he is going to do next. He’s fourteen years old and trying and failing to live with the knowledge that a week ago he killed one of his only two friends and stubbornly refusing to acknowledge the things in the dark that he can see more and more of every day. He wonders just once if maybe starting to see these things is a punishment for having killed Peter, and then he refuses to think about that anymore. Alternatively, and maybe more comfortingly, he might just be going insane.

Sister Mary finds him sleeping on a pew in the church, which he's wandered into mostly because it was warm and nobody else was there. He hadn't actually meant to fall asleep. He apologizes to her and then to the old man hovering anxiously over her shoulder, and she looks hard at him and says, “Kid, you can see ghosts."

"Oh, god damn it," says Frank, and then winces. “Shit. I’m sorry. Not in a church. I mean, I _can_?"

"Yes," the nun says says brusquely. “You didn’t know?”

“No,” Frank says. He’s not sure whether he’s lying or not. The stern nun and the old man don’t look angry, but he is on the verge of panicking. He didn't get away after all, he thinks. The awful things are just _following_ him. He’s trapped and he needs help _,_ he needs someone to stop these things that are happening to him, and he wonders whether maybe he _did_ end up here here on purpose after all. Maybe what he needs is an exorcist.

“You’d better come meet Father Lancaster,” Sister Mary says. “Ignore the ghost, he’s harmless. Kick him if he annoys you. He’s going to be the least of your worries from now on. Sister Mary Torquemada, nice to meet you. What’s your name, kid?”

“Frank Doyle," says Frank as he follows the nun down the aisle to the back of the church. She shows absolutely no sign of surprise.

_I sought sanctuary with the Church,_ he'll tell people later when they ask about his past (when he tells them anything at all), but truth be told it might be more accurate to say that the Church sweeps him up and sucks him in. Father Lancaster gives him meals and a place to sleep and a purpose in the world, because he sees the potential in Frank's anger and hunger to learn and do something about the weird and awful things in the world he's only just found out about. The nuns teach him how to hold his drink and how to swear in Latin. Frank learns incantations and formal speech and how to walk less like a... _boy_... and more like a man and how to kill things, how to make sure the glowing eyes in the dark go away for good.

He gets _good_ , if he says so himself. He thinks Frank Doyle, Professional Exorcist and Slayer of Monsters, has a nice ring to it. He counts his kills for the first six months and then stops because he thinks not keeping track seems more expert. It won’t occur to him for a while that he’s less a professional than a tool. He’s lonely as hell, but at least he thinks he’s redeeming himself.

Catherine approaches him, actually, not that it matters much. She comes up to him, light-footed, and tugs on his sleeve when he’s picking up after Mass one day. “Excuse me,” she says quietly, looking up at him with eyes that only seem innocent at first glance, “but I need help. I think I’m seeing monsters. I’m not crazy, please believe me.”

He can’t imagine why she would be lying. “What kind of monsters?” he inquires with professional calm.

“Well, vampires, I think, but I killed them,” she says. “I do hope they were vampires. Otherwise I have a whole different set of problems on my hands. The church does help with this kind of thing, don’t they?”

“Well, matter of fact,” Frank says, “yes.” He looks her up and down for a moment. “Look, come with me. I believe you about the vampires.”

“Oh, thank goodness,” she says, and flashes him a quick smile. 

He sets off toward the door to the back rooms, and then stops and looks back at her.  “I’m Frank, by the way,” he says.

“Catherine,” she says. “Nice to meet you, Frank.”

Turns out Catherine is good at killing things too. Two months in and Frank is already in awe of her. She’s seven months older than him, dark and girlish and compact as a spring ready to uncoil and lash out, and she seems quiet and meek until you see the way she handles a crossbow. 

She never tells him where she’s from, which is fair enough because she never asks him either. But she tells him her favorite kind of ice cream (strawberry) and teaches him to waltz and counters the gap between his front teeth by showing him an enormous scar on her knee which she says she got when she was nine, and her rare laugh is shy and gorgeous. The two of them stay up late around a lantern in the attic and talk about nothing and drink to try and forget the less pleasant things they've seen, a pair of serious, haunted teens who think they're saving the world and can't see much in their future other than more of the same. They’re both scared to death but at least neither of them are lonely anymore, and sometimes it seems they might even be happy.

In the scheme of everything, Frank has much bigger things to be worried about than his own body and heart. But worry he does all the same. Because between Catherine’s eyelashes and the casual way she holds the chalk while sketching out pentagrams in seconds flat and the curves of her legs when she sprawls over the rickety chairs in the attic of the church to pass him a flask, Frank thinks he might be falling in love.

They kiss for the first time in the dark of the church stairwell, tentative and fumbling and tasting of warm wine, and every time after that it’s like they’re chasing away the darkness in each other. Catherine tells him as she laces her fingers through his that Frank’s the first boy she ever loved, and he tells her in return that she's the first girl _he_ ever loved. And then he proceeds to think about that a lot more than he should and drink some more to try and stop thinking about it. He's going to have to tell her sometime, he thinks.

As it turns out, he never gets the chance to.

Father Lancaster sends Catherine and Frank after the Calaca two weeks before Catherine’s nineteenth birthday. They’ve been told it’s just a scouting mission to determine what the thing is and figure out its potential weaknesses. There’s no need to take any of the standard weapons. They’ll be fine.

Frank knows, _knows_ that Father Lancaster didn’t know what they were up against. He can intellectualize that all he wants, and later on he’ll try to. The information was in the books, sure, and the priest had been researching. But Father Lancaster didn’t _try_ to get Catherine killed. He wouldn’t have wanted to throw away one of his tools like that.

Frank doesn’t see her die. He isn’t there when she dances herself to death, and he doesn’t know whether that’s better or worse. They’ve split up to comb the block for the creature, and when he gets back and finds her lying limp on the floor there’s nothing he can do. He might have shouted, might have cried, might have panicked. It doesn’t matter.

Her body is heavy as he carries it back to the church, and her hair still smells like strawberries. 

He isn’t angry now. He’ll be angry later, but right now he is stunned. He goes to Father Lancaster hoping for some kind of explanation of _why_ she had to die, what could possibly have made _any_ of this worth it. He guesses he’s still naive enough to think there’ll be some kind of reason.

What he gets instead is Father Lancaster steepling his fingers and telling Frank over them, “She died doing the Lord’s work, boy. That is our mission. Occasional casualties are to be expected in this line of work.”

That’s when the anger surfaces, white-hot and blinding. Frank thinks he might kill Father Lancaster then, stake him like just another monster. He might have, except that the priest backs up against the wall, real fear and confusion in his eyes at how one of his own weapons could have turned on him. “I didn’t _know,”_ he says. “You can’t blame me for this, boy!”

“Tell me how to get her back,” Frank growls, his hands hovering not far from Father Lancaster’s throat. “ _Tell me how to kill it_.” 

The priest tells him. It might be out of spite. It’s probably just out of stupidity.

Frank kills the Calaca with the one silver bullet he can afford for himself and it will take him almost twenty years to realize that in doing so he's ruined his only chance of ever getting Catherine back.

He waits up all night on the Day of the Dead the next year in the spot where Catherine died. He _hates_ the church by that point, the hypocrisy and the indifference to human life and the awful things that he’s beginning to see the nuns do in the name of good that they don’t believe in, but mostly just the fact that Catherine is gone and nobody will apologize to him about it. 

But if he can just get her back, the two of them can leave. If he can just bring her back, and he has no doubt he’ll be able to if all it takes is a true love’s kiss, they’ll walk away from the church and build themselves a new and better life somewhere else. If he can just get her back, everything will be all right.

Except, of course, that Catherine never comes back.

Frank packs his bags that morning, teetering drunk and circles under his eyes from the long night but grimly determined. He doesn’t know what happened to Catherine. He doesn’t understand why she wasn’t there for him to save. But he knows he’s not staying here one day longer. He doesn’t know where he’s going and his head is full of static and right now he doesn’t really care whether he lives or dies, but he knows that any monster which tries to mess with him right now is going to get its head chopped off before it has a chance to even hiss at him.

He’d hoped that he could get away quietly without having to explain himself to anyone, because he doesn’t owe anyone explanations anymore. When Father Lancaster catches him heading out the back door and says, “Where are you going, boy?” Frank almost wants to just run, but he doesn’t need to run anymore.

He squares his shoulders, turns to face the priest, and says, “I’m leaving.”

Father Lancaster stares at him. “ _Excuse_ me? _Why_?” he demands.

“Catherine didn’t come back,” Frank says. “I’m done with the church, Father. I thank you for all you’ve done for me, and now you can all go to hell.”

“You’re not _leaving_ ,” Father Lancaster says, laughing. Frank puts his chin up, clenches his fists hard to stop himself from uttering some Egyptian curse, and thinks he’s not a kid anymore and he really doesn’t _care._

“Yes, I am,” he says, and turns to walk out.

“Frank!” the priest snaps, and his anger is sudden but Frank’s was there already, old and familiar, boiling under the surface and taking over the grief. “You will _not_ just walk away from this church. We gave you sanctuary. We taught you everything you know. And this is how you repay us, you ungrateful little _boy?_ ”

“Well,” Frank says, “you killed the one thing I ever loved, so let’s call it even. No. Not even. You owe _me,_ and I’m still leaving.”

“You won’t make it a month,” the priest shouts after him as he turns his back and walks out of the small and shabby church for the last time. “You don’t know how to make it on your own, boy. All you know how to do is kill things, Frank Doyle. You don’t know how to keep anything _alive._ ”

Frank doesn’t look back. He’s going to prove him wrong, he thinks. For Catherine’s sake if nothing else. He _has_ to. He’s going to revenge her and make a name for himself all on his own in the process. He’ll become the most famous monster hunter in the world and then maybe, somewhere along the way, he’ll find something that will let him raise the dead.

He wanders for a while after that. He drinks with grim determination and tries to forget about having been happy in some part of his life. He finds he can, in fact, more or less make a living as a freelance exterminator of the supernatural, and he gravitates toward the big city because he imagines there will be more of other people’s ghosts there and fewer of his own. 

On the train he reads books with spells about shapeshifting and male virility which he tries out on himself later in the dark of tiny hotel rooms. He keeps an eye out for genie bottles because he has exactly three things he would like to wish for — one for himself, one for a dead girl, and one involving alcohol. 

He never finds one, and the spells don’t really work beyond letting him grow a moustache, but later on he’ll think that was probably just as well. He shouldn’t be meddling in the supernatural on his own behalf — it’s only barely worth it to meddle in it for other people’s sakes. Nothing good ever comes out of making deals with spirits, and it’s no use giving yourself a different body if you’re only going to end up dead in it.

He ends up in New York eventually, almost by accident but not against his will. The city makes him feel anonymous and less exposed if also small and very, very tired, and the life grows on him eventually. There’s so much glamour ready for him to take part in if he only wears the right jacket and talks the right way and plays the part of a dashing monster hunter or even a charming ordinary man, and he’s not averse to playing along. He sleeps under bridges, tries not to freeze or starve to death during the hard months, and hangs out in a lot of bars—first the regular kind and then, in an astonishing flash of self-discovery, the kind you can get arrested for even being in. 

For the first time in his life, Frank finds there are places where he mostly doesn’t have to worry about hiding who he is. He gets picked up by women and by men who think he’s cute or mysterious or both, and sometimes he has to explain himself but mostly they don’t care. He makes it a hobby of his to copy the girls in suits and the boys in dresses and the people who float somewhere in between or beyond, and he cultivates a devil-may-care attitude that eventually he doesn’t have to pretend to put on anymore. 

He wakes up in jail cells more often than he would like, sure. But as long as he can keep on drinking and occasionally stake a vampire who’s gotten too into the clubbing experience, he thinks he can keep on going like this for as long as his alcohol-damaged memory holds.

He meets Pterodactyl Jones in one of said clubs, in fact, on a Thursday evening when there aren’t many people around. The man slides over the bar to Frank, nudges him with an elbow, and nods at one of the pairs of regulars slow-dancing together in the corner. "Hey, buddy. Want to pick those dames up? One for you, one for me."

Frank takes a long, slow look at Jones, who is burly and clean-shaven and wearing a hat and a much nicer suit than Frank has ever been able to afford and who is almost certainly not a regular here. “Ordinarily I would be amenable to if vaguely alarmed by your offer,” he says, “but I do not think that either of _them_ are interested in us."

Then he takes another look at Jones or rather what is perched just over his shoulder, blinks, and says, “I may be a drunk, but I do not think I am _that_ drunk. Are you aware that you are currently accompanied by the ghost of a rather large prehistoric flying reptile?”

"Aw, yeah," Jones says. "Harvey. He's an old sweetie." He reaches up and pets the ghostly beak of the pterodactyl — Harvey — who is taking up about a third of the bar, wings poking through various counters. "Say, buddy, you can see the supernatural?”

Frank sticks out a hand for the man to shake. “Frank Doyle. Former professional exorcist. At your service.”

“Peter Jones,” Jones says. He has a firm and trustworthy handshake that he’s probably practiced a _lot._ “Call me Pterodactyl, on account of old Harvey here. Say, Frank, I don't suppose you want to partner up? Another buddy and I are starting up a monster hunting gang. We could use an exorcist.”

This could be interesting, Frank thinks. “Tell me more,” he says, leaning closer to Jones and raising an eyebrow. He follows Jones’ gaze as it drifts away momentarily and adds, “Really do _not_ try and pick those girls up, though. Sara will almost certainly put a heel through your foot. And her shoes are _spiky_ , believe me.”

A couple of drinks later, he follows Jones into a cab with only slight hesitation and watches the pterodactyl fly after them while just keeping an eye on Jones with his peripheral vision, because he’s got a stake hidden in his jacket and he’s not afraid of much anymore. Jones’ place turns out to be an apartment in the basement of a building in the medium-seedy part of town — not fancy by any stretch of the imagination, but no worse than Frank is used to dealing with. He saunters around the living room inspecting the African masks and crucifixes and knives in the open cabinets and says to Jones, “Looks pretty professional. You have some… unusual things here.” 

“Eh, yeah. You have to be flexible in this job. Lots of different monsters in New York, the place attracts them for some reason.” Jones leans through one of the open doorways and yells, “Mendles! We got another guy for the gang!”

As it turns out they work _well_ together, him and Jones and Mendles. Frank never finds out what PJ’s story is, but the guy’s quirks aside, he can beat up werewolves and wendigos like you wouldn’t believe. Red Wolf Mendles, who’s a huge brown man who grew up hitting dybbuks with baseball bats, runs around with a book full of potentially world-ending Aramaic spells that he’s not afraid to unleash on any nasties. Frank handles the ghosts and demons more terminally than might always be strictly necessary, and Harvey deals with everything that gets past the three of them.

They gain a reputation for themselves, they really do. At first people call them Those Exorcists With The Pterodactyl, and then, later on, just The Gang — as in, _oh, we’ve got a sea monster in the lake, better call in The Gang_. They get invited into classier and classier places to discreetly deal with ghostly or vampiric dinner guests. Frank has to take them tuxedo shopping at one point so they can mingle more efficiently with the upper crust, and they spend the next few cocktail parties grinning at one another across all the sequined dresses because even if they’re just there to do a job they know they’ve _made_ it, kid.

Strangers start giving them a wider berth on the street — something about their stride, probably — and kids with Ouija boards run up to them to ask for their autographs. Frank signs their shirt cuffs or whatever they offer him and then tells them _not_ to screw around with the supernatural, kids, none of you know what you’re getting yourselves into and you really do not want to get mixed up in it.

Partly he wishes he could have told that to his younger self, but partly he just says it because it makes him feel superior to them. He’s getting awfully egoistic for someone who still sleeps on a folding cot in the living room of someone else’s apartment.

People call them in when they need the big guns now, for the apocalypse aversions and high-level demons, and mostly the Gang doesn’t even have to roll their sleeves up before they send whatever eldritch horrors are getting uppity back where they came from with their forked tails between their legs. They get very, very cocky. Frank will think later that they really did think they were invincible.

That was probably where they went wrong. Because as it turns out, what it takes to show them that they are most decidedly _not_ invincible is just an ordinary if particularly nasty poltergeist.

It starts out as just another standard exorcism in an abandoned mansion that enterprising vagrants and adventurous teens have been going into and not coming out of again. Frank is a little alarmed to hear that particular description, but Red Wolf goes in to scope out the situation and reports back that it’s just an angry spirit knocking people over the head with lamps. Nothing they can’t handle easily.

Turns out that this particular ghost is really, _really_ good at disorienting people. Frank is frantically drawing sigils on the crumbling boards of a bedroom floor and trying to listen with half an ear for where the hell the others have gone when an entire bookcase throws itself at him and smashes through the wood floor to the basement below with Frank trapped underneath it, and that’s the last thing he remembers for a while.

He wakes up in the hospital four days later with a chest full of cracked ribs and the only way he knows he’s not dead is because being dead shouldn’t hurt anywhere near this much. PJ’s dozed off by in a chair by his bedside with one arm in a sling, but he jolts upright when Frank coughs painfully. 

“Oh, thank god, you’re awake,” he says. “They weren’t sure you were gonna make it, buddy.”

Frank tries to say something and his lungs scream at him in protest. He just wants to go back to sleep, he thinks. Or, failing that, drink a _lot_.

“I think,” he wheezes, “that I need a drink.”

“I couldn’t get any in past the nurses,” Jones says. “Sorry.”

“Figures,” Frank sighs, and then he thinks, _Red Wolf?_

“Is…” he asks, “Is Mendles all right?”

Jones’s expression darkens. “We don’t know,” he says. “We just don’t know.”

“You don’t mean…”

“He hasn’t woken up. Harvey got pretty beat up too. Frank…”

“Yes?” Frank says, trying not to breathe too heavily. And then, still bleary, he finally notices how strangely Jones is looking at him. 

“Oh,” he says. “Oh, now come on, _really._ ”

“I don’t think I know what the hell is going on with anyone anymore,” Jones says. “The doctors…”

“Finding things out about me while I’m asleep is _quite_ unfair,” Frank growls. “Look, Jonesey, fellow, I—“

“I don’t _care,_ Frank,” Jones says. “I really do not care. It’s your own business what you got going on with your body. I’ve seen way stranger stuff in this business. We have bigger things to worry about. ‘Cause I think Mendles is going to die.”

“Oh,” Frank says, and solves all his immediate problems by passing out again.

He doesn’t get out of the hospital for another week and a half, and at that point Mendles still hasn’t woken up. Frank sleeps a lot, researches frantically the rest of the time, and slathers all his broken pieces with pixie salve in attempts to heal faster. PJ avoids paying their bills and skirts around Frank carefully. He’s maybe a little afraid of him now, and of what he’s determined to drag them both into, The two of them avoid each other’s eyes and don’t really succeed in pretending that what they’re planning might make things go back to the way they were before. 

But  Frank isn’t letting _anyone_ else die on his watch, not anymore.  When Mendles’ torn-up body finally gives up for good in the night in late November, Frank and Jones are there sitting at the foot of his hospital bed with red chalk, a freshly killed black chicken, and a book of spells on how to raise the dead.

It doesn’t work. Well, _technically_ it works perfectly. But as it turns out, Red Wolf Mendles is _not_ happy about being a zombie. 

When PJ calls out the last of the incantation and Red Wolf sits up pale and gasping, the first thing he does is shout curse words in Yiddish and Sanskrit and probably Zulu at Frank and Jones for about ten minutes. Things fall off the wall and smash on the floor; the lights flicker on and then blow out. An alarm starts blaring somewhere in the distance. Frank and Jones shield their heads with their arms and plead frantically at Mendles to _calm down, for god’s sake._ Red Wolf’s face is gaunt and waxy and _wrong_ and his movements aren’t quite right, and Frank doesn’t want to admit that they made a mistake, but… he is beginning to think that they made a mistake.

“A zombie?” Mendles finally snaps. “You made me into a _verkakte zombie?_ ” 

“You were dying,” Frank hisses at him. “What did you want us to do, just sit there and let you?” 

“Yes!” Red Wolf yells. “You don’t just screw around with raising the dead! Are you kidding me? You idiots should know better than this by now!” Then he tries to take a deep breath, which does not exactly work given the current state of his lungs, and says, “Look, _khaverim_ , I appreciate you doin’ this for me, but bein’ undead is really really not my thing. Believe me when I say that this is _not_ pleasant.”

Frank and Jones eye each other in silence. Red Wolf swings his huge, dead legs out of bed and stretches his arms out at angles that don’t look humanly possible, torn muscles and willpower working painfully against broken bones. “I’m out. I am out of this city. Goodbye to you two _meshuga’im_. _Ya’allah,_ fighting things you can’t hit is the _worst_.”

“You’re _leaving?_ ” PJ demands. 

“Yep. I think I’m going back to New Orleans to see if there’re any other shamans know how to undo this.”

“Are you kidding me?” Frank snaps. “ You want to go _back_ to being dead _?_ Do you have any _idea_  how hard I — how hard we  worked to bring you back?”

“Yeah, yeah, _kushke,_ I noticed. Good job. But as previously mentioned, I am disgusted by my own dead body and also not too happy about you two doin’ this to me without asking me first. Also…” He looks Frank up and down and his brows wrinkle, and Frank just thinks, _oh, come on._  

Red Wolf shakes his head and turns away. “Yeah, basically I got to get out of this place. Nice working with you two. Say _shalom_ to Harvey for me. I gotta go find someone who’s willing to sell a train ticket to a dead guy.” 

He lumbers out the door. After a while, a nurse shouts something panicked in the distance. Frank and PJ sit very still until the running noises have stopped and then turn to look at each other.

“Well then,” PJ says quietly. “That worked real well.” 

Frank says nothing. He could be angry but mostly he’s very tired all of a sudden, and he can’t think of anything to say that could make this better for any of them.

He should have learned by now, he thinks. He should have known that this would happen. He can’t keep his friends alive even if he does know how to raise the dead. He just doesn’t know how he managed to fuck everything up this badly.

“Frank?” PJ says. He shakes Frank by the shoulder. “Frank, we should get out of here. Come on.” 

They slip out through the dark hallways and shuffle through the chilly streets, chins tucked into the upturned collars of their coats. Frank’s ribcage still hurts and the way Red Wolf looked at him before he left keeps turning over in his mind. He doesn’t know which part of him the hurt disgust was directed at. He thinks it probably doesn’t matter, because he deserves it in any case.

_Well,_ he thinks. _Well… fine then. Fine_.

“We should split up, Peej,” he says. “Go our own ways. Make our own living. This gang does not seem to hold the same charm as it did previously, and besides, you and Harvey make a wonderful team on your own. I would only get in the way of a man and his pterodactyl.” 

Jones looks hurt for a fraction of a second, and then he just stares hard at Frank. He’s been treating him a little differently since the hospital and Frank _hates_ it. “Are you sure? You really think you can manage on your own right now, Frank?”

“Jonesey,” Frank says, leaning very close to Jones’ face and patting him on the stubbly cheek, “I am in fact an _expert_ in managing on my own _._ Believe me.”

“Keep in touch!” Jones calls after him as he walks away.

Frank is getting very, very good at walking away from people who should at one point have mattered to him. His ribs aren’t really healed yet, but hey, what else is alcohol for but making problems go away? 

He doesn’t remember much of the next year or two, which is probably just as well. He thinks there’s a lot of punching ghosts involved, and _definitely_ a lot of dirt-cheap liquor. There isn’t much that he can think of to live for, but he doesn’t have the energy to stop drinking for long enough to do anything active about dying. He thinks Father Lancaster was almost certainly right about him and he aggressively does not _care._  

He doesn’t _need_ people who care about him as long as he’s got a job to do because getting close to people only ever got them killed and him hurt, and he will shout it loudly and wittily at the sky for anyone who cares to listen. He cultivates a wide and tipsy circle of acquaintances who are all charmed by him and know almost nothing about him beyond what drinks he prefers and who laugh with him when he insults them to their faces. He’s getting awfully bitter for someone who’s not yet thirty, but bitter is pretty much how he _likes_ things.

And then, out of the blue, he meets Sadie. It’s like being hit by a bookcase all over again, but this time in a _good_ way.

The month hasn’t been a great one up until then, not that any of them are. He’s been low on jobs except for the ones Jonesey tips him off on — Jonesey, who’s lost his edge, who’s working as a bartender and Frank only ran into again accidentally, who’s almost given up on himself in a way that Frank steadfastly refuses to worry about but who still wants to help Frank out. Frank’s been having trouble paying for hotel rooms, his ribs are starting to show again, and his dignity is practically the only thing he has left. 

This job, though, with the tentacle-faced demon or whatever it was before he chopped its head off, should be enough to keep him in the warm for a couple days more. He feels practically heroic again as he heads off to foil Bobo Brubaker at his latest con game — he can afford to do this one gratis. Never let it be said that Frank Doyle is completely selfish. He still saves kids sometimes because it’s what he’s supposed to do, and he’s certainly willing to save a medium over a first-rate martini.

The job goes absolutely _nothing_ like he expected and normally spirits like this would be enough to spoil his week if not his life. But for the first time ever, this job ends not with ectoplasm burns but with Sadie Parker.

There’s a spark the moment they first lock eyes across the room, as if everything in Frank’s life up to now has only been in order to push him toward this day, here with her. He doesn’t have to wonder whether he’s in love this time; it’s as obvious as the rising sun. The way Sadie deals with the ghosts certainly doesn’t hurt, and the drinks she mixes are enough to make him want to propose on the spot.

Frank gave up on fairy tales around the time he found out that most of them were all too real and would kill you if they got the chance. Lucky breaks were for other people, never, ever for him, and love at first sight was a ridiculous myth. But by the time he and Sadie have finished their cooler of martinis expertly mixed by Sadie and watched the ghost puppies frolic away into the sky and started kissing lazily in the grass, he thinks he might be on his way to reconsidering.

Sadie is so, so different from Catherine, who was frightened and angry and would never have stopped to think about _forgiving_ a ghost. But Sadie is willing to stop and listen and consider, mostly because she’s not afraid of anything. And for the first time in a very long time, Frank thinks that neither is he.

He probably does’t deserve someone like Sadie, no, not really. But on the other hand, the universe probably owes him by this point for all the other things he didn’t deserve either.

Frank doesn’t toss around concepts like ‘soulmates’ lightly — until just now he wasn’t even sure he believed in love anymore. But he cannot think of any other term for what he and Sadie must be. For goodness’ sake, they are both terrified of bees in equal measure. This cannot be a coincidence.

When dusk is settling that evening and the grass is growing damp from dew, the two of them take a taxi cab back to Sadie’s apartment. She warns him that her place is quite small — it doesn’t even have a separate guest parlor—but one sometimes has to make do with less in this modern world, you know. Frank, who is currently carrying the sum total of his worldly goods in the black duffel bag by his feet, nods understandingly and snakes an arm around her waist. 

“Sadie, my love,” he says after a period of increasingly comfortable silence interrupted only by the periodical screech of the wheels, “what would you say if I told you I was a bit… unusual in the bedroom department? Hypothetically.”

“Well, Frank,” Sadie says contemplatively, “in that _entirely_ hypothetical case I would tell _you_ that I dated a girl in college who turned into a vampire halfway through our junior year, so probably whatever you have to offer cannot be more unusual than that. Why, are you likely to tell me such a thing?”

“Well, I’m not _now,_ ” Frank says indignantly, or as close to it as he can manage, and grins in not-entirely-unexpected relief into her hair. “Fair enough, though.”

“As long as I can find out all the details _soon_ ,” Sadie says. “We may just _match,_ Frank, darling.” And it hits Frank out of nowhere that Sadie is tall and twiggish enough even without her high-heeled shoes that this in fact might, just _might_ , be the case.

“Yes,” he says. “Let’s do.”

“ _Clink,”_ she tells him, miming a glass, and in her mouth it sounds less like a sound effect and more like a promise.

“Clink,” he echoes. 

And they do, in fact, drink happily ever after.

**Author's Note:**

> This is pretty much half "let's make the Doyles as queer as possible" and half "I have a lot of feelings about Frank's backstory". I don't really know how it ended up working out. But hey.
> 
> Many, _many_ thanks to trisidael, who beta'd for me and caught some pretty big canon discrepancies, as well as to Fyo, who did an initial read-over and gave me the thumbs-up. You guys are fantastic.


End file.
